The biggest find in twelve years of GTA archeology came from an Edinburgh flea market and a used Xbox 360
It’s fascinating when we discover details years (even decades) after a game’s release that hadn’t come to light before. Secret levels in classics that everyone had examined from cover to cover, unrevealed meanings, unsolved puzzles… and sometimes, versions of the games that should never have seen the light of day and that give clues about the ideas that were considered in the development process. The latest case in that sense: ‘GTA IV’. What has happened? Last weekend, a user of GTAForums known as janmatant He paid £5 at a flea market in Edinburgh for an Xbox 360 in not very good condition. At home he discovered that the console was running Xshell, the operating system for Microsoft development kits. The 120 GB hard drive contained a single game: a beta version of ‘Grand Theft Auto IV’ dated November 2007, several months before its commercial release. The treasures he found were poured into the thread GTA IV Beta Huntwho has been tracking unreleased content from the game since 2014 (and which has generated 14 new pages of comments since posting janmatant). GTA IV on the trail. That the discovery occurred in Edinburgh is not at all coincidental. Rockstar North has been based in the capital since it was DMA Design, in 1987, and that is why the console ended up in the hands of a scrap dealer, a process that clearly should not have happened. Development kits are proprietary hardware that Microsoft distributes exclusively to studios (and in those days also to the press) to run games in conditions close to the final hardware. In theory, at the end of a project cycle, those units are returned or destroyed, but this was not the case. 118 gigabytes of Liberty City. After confirming by the serial number that the devkit was authentic, janmatant uploaded the content to the Internet Archive under the title “Great Stealing of Vehicles four XDK”. The 118 GB file is it executable on a real Xbox 360 with debugging tools, although a fully playable version is not yet ready. The most immediate find was the Liberty City ferries. The barges appear in the game’s first trailer and in some cutscenes, but in the final game they are just a set piece. The realistic ‘GTA IV’ opted for a world focused on cars and taxis and in its day, Obbe Vermeij, former technical director of Rockstar North, counted that the shuttles were removed late in development, with models already finished. Zombie mode. There had always been rumors about a zombie mode for which we had never had solid evidence. Herein build We find hospital beds with direct references to zombies, early models of infected characters and several animations associated with this variant. The Cutting Room Floorthe wiki dedicated to documenting cut content in video games, had already listed the project as “Z: Resurrection” based on code fragments found in the final version, but without visual material to support it. A former Rockstar developer It has taken away some of the epicness of the matter: According to him, zombie mode was simply an “experiment” that artists and programmers played to develop in parallel, not a formal production line. That doesn’t mean the discovery is minor, but rather that the creative leeway within Rockstar North in 2007 allowed a team to test out survival horror mechanics during development. Other divergences. The build includes other substantial differences from the final game. The silenced pistol is in this version’s arsenal, along with other unfinished weapons and a notable number of incomplete animations and unreplaced audio markers, as is the case with any half-developed game. The models of some NPCs are different from the final ones, and the character of Michelle, the FIB informant who appears as Niko Bellic’s early romantic interest, has a look here that forum users describe as strangely disturbing. What may be most surprising to any fan of the game is that about half of the radio stations sound completely different. ‘GTA IV’ has one of the most elaborate soundtracks in the saga, with dozens of real music licenses distributed on thematic stations. That half of that content changed between November 2007 and the April 2008 release says a lot about the licensing negotiation process in the final phases of development. What does Rockstar do? After everything that happened, Rockstar Games and Take-Two have not issued public statements. Although companies have a reputation for relentlessly pursuing leaks, the author of this leak purchased the console legally. In any case, he has put the devkit up for sale on eBay for £800. It’s not too much for material of such magnitude, but the truth is that, once on the Internet, access to these secrets is universal. In Xataka | The best video games of 2026 and the most interesting ones to come
